I spent the first week of the year away in Amsterdam. I was actually supposed to be in California, but for the second time in a few years, I canceled a trip to where I’m from for reasons that would have felt foreign in a pre-2020 world.
Worrying about the baby getting sick (flu, RSV, Covid etc) in the US — where there’s currently a shortage of children’s Tylenol, antibiotics, pediatric hospital beds, and not to mention a healthcare system that has no qualms about driving you to bankruptcy for having the audacity to get sick — felt like the opposite of a holiday. So we reluctantly decided to postpone for a less viral time of year. In a not at all surprising twist, California has been battered by successive storms the entire time we were supposed to be there, so I guess we made the right decision.
A few days before we were supposed to leave for Amsterdam, I got a message from Eurostar saying that our return train had been canceled due to rail strikes in the UK. “Here we go again,” I thought, “another trip canceled.” We ended up going and having a great time, but I’m still surprised the trip happened without any major disruption.
It all feels of a piece with what one recent Guardian piece called “the age of inconvenience.” The age where nothing works anymore. Nothing arrives when it should. Everything is more expensive every time you go to the shop. The weather is unprecedented, once again. Hot water bottles are sold out because people avoid putting on their heating. Ambulances take forever to come. In fact, you can’t count on much in the way of public services — especially from the UK’s Tory government, which proudly and brazenly does the opposite of everything a government should.
I have mixed feelings about all this. On the one hand, there is no excuse for chronically broken public services and a cost of living crisis that have people resorting to Dickensian measures to survive. Just pay the nurses and rail employees and the postmen more! It’s not that hard! No one is going to be mad about better-funded public services, except for the politicians’ buddies who profit off of privatization. And I’d argue these things are not mere inconveniences, but rather inhumanities.
But on the other hand, I see aspects of this era as somewhat overdue. Capitalism promises convenience, but when everything is convenient, we unknowingly lose a lot. I think there is a certain amount of friction that is a necessary and welcome part of the human experience. Remove it, and weird things start to happen.
As one organic farmer put it in
, “We’ve lost that love of going: ‘I’m going to make this turnip work for me. This might not be tomato season but it’s turnip season, and I can do something brilliant with turnips.” Similarly, we are outraged when flying to the other side of the world in the middle of a snowstorm involves some measure of hardship. We don’t understand why the 3 month old baby won’t sleep through the night despite buying all the right gadgets, inputting every burp and diaper change into an app, and hiring the expensive sleep consultant that everyone recommended. After all, we were promised everything we want exactly when we want it!As someone who used to travel a lot — and write about travel for a living — one of the biggest changes in my life in the last few years is that I spend a lot more time in one place. International trips are a much bigger undertaking these days, logistically, financially, and psychologically. There’s a part of me that mourns the ease with which I used to flit around the world, priding myself on never checking a bag. But then again, isn’t the very point of travel the idea of experiencing something you cannot get at home? Maybe it shouldn’t be so easy, so immediate, so quotidian. Maybe if we couldn’t get there and back so easily, we’d think more deeply about whether and where to go.
I think a lot about the fact that many of the things we’ve grown accustomed to in our modern age are things that are both bad for us and the planet. Humans have tremendous capacity for innovation, technology, and progress. While we shouldn’t shy away from that, I think part of the work of our lifetimes is to choose where to apply it, both at a societal level and in our own lives. To not always choose the tomatoes flown in from another country when we can figure out what to do with the turnip grown right down the road.
I think the future calls for a lot more of what author Ross Gay termed “jenkiness” in his lovely collection, The Book of Delights.
“Like the old window I propped on a stray log to make a little hotbox for my squash, cucumber, and watermelon starts. So jenky. One of the many delights of a garden, I am finding, are the ways it encourages jenkiness. Something about the delirium incited by lily blooms or the pollinators’ swooning over the bush cherry interrupts one’s relationship to commerce, perhaps. The garden makes you grab the nearest thing so you can keep crawling through it. It might be that the logics of delight interrupt the logics of capitalism.”
I am interested in ways to bring this jenkiness, this interdependency, this frugal and sustainable creativity, to other areas of life. To not see it as compromise or sacrifice, but as ingenuity and a different kind of efficiency. I actually think the real progress may be when I don’t want absolutely everything to be convenient anymore.
In the end, I enjoyed the simplicities of our trip to Amsterdam even more than I expected to. Having an afternoon beer in a sidewalk bar. Grocery shopping in a foreign supermarket and buying way too many snacks. Observing how other people live, and using that as a mirror to look at your own life. That it was more work and less certain to happen somehow made it more sweet. It’s funny how that works.
Things I enjoyed reading
After I gave up on Twitter, I started spending more time on Reddit. It’s a real upgrade, honestly. This piece captures why, including the power of human-moderators that actually have a stake in their online communities. [New Yorker]
When I read my friend Anna Brones’ suggestion to treat January as an “in-between month,” my shoulders immediately lowered. [Creative Fuel]
“People with Alzheimer’s often show a gift for rich presence that eludes many of us.” [New Yorker].
I spent many hours of my teen years in the magazine aisles of Barnes & Noble bookstore of Westlake Village, California. So it’s fascinating to read how the once-doomed brand has successfully reinvented itself by taking a cue from Daunt Books, one of London’s most beloved bookshops. [The Honest Broker]
“It is so easy to be entirely sublimated by motherhood, to allow your self to be annihilated. To demand boundaries, to assert that you have a right to make art: that requires strength and conviction.” [The Guardian]
Three fun things: It’s not at all surprising to me that house cats defy the laws of physics. There are some genuinely good ideas on this list of 52 acts of kindness. A useful taxonomy of the different kinds of rest.
Things I enjoyed listening to
From Covid to pregnancy/newborns, the way public health officials communicate with the public feels really broken. I think Emily Oster is really good at explaining why, and offering realistic alternatives. [The Free Press]
Listening to two practicing attorneys decode the myriad legal dramas of the Real Housewives cast is A+++ escapism makes me regret never going to law school. [Bravo Docket]
Quick programming note
Some annual paid subscribers were mistakenly charged the old rate ($45) when their subscriptions renewed recently. (I’m blaming this one on Substack!) By my records, I have refunded all of those people to reflect the correct lower amount, which is $30. But if your annual subscription renewed recently for $45 and you didn’t receive a partial refund a few days later, please let me know so I can sort it out. Apologies — this stuff keeps me up at night!
Word Soup
“Take this on faith; the mind may never find the explanations that it seeks, but you will move forward nonetheless.” —Donna Faulds
“I saw how our lives are not about action, are not about contemplation, they’re just about being here, suspended in life’s net — here for such a short time, glinting and glittering against the sun, lifted out of the ocean’s depths to where everyone can see it, then plunged back in again — anonymous, gone.” —Sheila Heti
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Hi Rosie, thanks for the great newsletter as always <3. I wanted to share a laugh with you in response to your shared link about cats defying physics. Look up the buttered cat paradox... to mix the principle the article mentioned with the fact that buttered toast always lands face down! One of my professors shared this with me last term and it gave me a good lol :)
Hi Rosie,
I’m glad and appreciate your essay including and turning to turnips and jenkiness.
I often worry about expectations and the convenience factor being played out all around me. Expectations can be fraught with disappointment and frustration, which can, or seems to, lead to a host of unsightly behaviors, mannerisms, and depression.
I’m finding, and enjoying, living a smaller life, by appreciating all that is near by and easily accessible. More and more, looking back over the last three years, they seem blurry, and were full of angst and uncertainty. For now, I prefer my current atmospheric river of home, family, neighbors, friends, weather and predictability.
We very much missed you this past holiday, and can’t wait until travel becomes easier and safer, and we get to welcome you and your family back home.
Thank you for your thoughts, words and wisdom.
EHB